4/27/98: Got out and about to survey the town a little bit more. A lovely water front and harbor. Lots of quaint shops, some touristy and pricey, some cozy and authentic. There were many linen shops. I wonder if that is a local specialty or something, like kilim carpets in Cappadokia Turkey.
4/27/23: On this day in 1998 we had an unexpected scare with an even more unexpected happy resolution. Ruth had had back surgery about five months prior. The surgery was successful, but there was some intense residual nerve pain, so she had been given a prescription pain reliever back in Chicago. It was time to refill the prescription, so we trotted out to find a local pharmacy. We were shocked to find out that the pharmacist could not fill the prescription because he was not at all familiar with the name of the medicine! A small pharmacy on a Greek Island was not connected to a computer network of US pharmacies so that he could just log-in and access Ruth’s details. However, we knew that a new and emerging internet search engine had launched just the year before. We found a local internet café, sat down at a terminal and typed in “google.com.”
Ruth was able to type in the name of the medicine in her prescription, and then track down precise details on the chemical make-up of the medicine. With print-out in hand, we returned to the pharmacist, who then was able to fill the prescription without any difficulty at all. In fact, he indicated that in Greece that medicine did not even require a prescription!
It is easy to take technology for granted these days, but in 1998 the public-facing aspects of the internet were still in their early days. The Google search engine had only been officially launched in 1997, and Yahoo had only been launched in 1995. The earliest online diaries occurred in 1994, but the term “weblog” wasn’t coined until 1997, as the practice began to spread, and “Livejournal,” “Xanga” and “Blogger.com” did not launch until 1999. (Check out a helpful history here.)
All that to say, in those pioneering days of online personal publishing, we thought it was pretty cool that the “world wide web” and internet cafés made it possible for us to publish one of the earliest travel blogs as we circumnavigated the globe in 1998. But we were especially thankful that the same emerging technologies made a harbor of knowledge available to us, and resulted in our being able to fill a much-needed prescription for pain medicine!
